This is a Call

by Paul Brannigan

  ‘I liked Olympia, but it was sorta like Washington DC’s retarded stepbrother,’ says Grohl. ‘There was a connection between the two cities because Calvin and Ian [MacKaye] knew each other, and maybe Calvin lived in DC for a time. But it was a weird scene. It was fun, and I would never say bad things about Olympia because some great things came from there, but I felt like an outsider for sure. The whole time I was in Seattle I felt like an outsider.

  ‘I remember Slim Moon calling me “The Rocker”. That was the first time anyone had called me that and I was like, “Really?” But I was from Scream, and Scream had long hair and tattoos, so they knew I wasn’t some straight-edge Dischord kid who had gone to Georgetown University. But I’d never really thought about who I was. I wasn’t a squatter and I wasn’t a crusty or an indie guy – I was just a guy with long hair and a leather jacket who played the drums. But from my early days in Olympia I was “The Rocker”.

  ‘There was one band in town that I related to called Fitz of Depression: I could hang with those dudes because they were kinda scummy like me. But I was lonely. It didn’t take long before I called LA and told Pete Stahl, “Hey man, I really miss you.” Franz and Pete were both pretty fucking pissed off and I could understand that, but I had to do what I had to do. So I’d call down there and talk to Pete and Pete would say, “Hey Franz, do you wanna talk to Dave?” And there’d be this long silence and then Pete would say, “Yeah, he doesn’t really want to talk to you.” So it was a pretty lonely time. I didn’t know anybody up there. I was up there all by myself with a bunch of strangers who, to be honest, were really weird.’

  ‘I can only guess how out of it someone like Dave would have felt in Olympia after years on the road with the partying road dogs that were Scream,’ says musician, activist and founder of Simple Machines records Jenny Toomey, a DC resident who lived in the Martin Building in the summer of 1990. ‘Baileys Crossroads and Olympia are not a matched pair of cities. I really love Olympia, so I don’t want to seem in any way snarky, but it was simultaneously one of the coolest and most fucked-up places I have ever been. When Dave says those folks were weird … they really were. They all dressed in 1950s and ’60s clothes with kitty-cat glasses, they baked pies and made apple butter, they had dance parties and made mix tapes. Everyone was in a band, everyone crafted, everyone had a fanzine, everyone was everyone else’s biggest fans … even when they were not. It was all sugar and cream with the dark ripple that can only come from living in a building with sixteen to twenty apartments inhabited by a handful of artists who had all slept together, broken up, picked sides and fermented mini wars while maintaining a façade of inclusiveness, openness and revolution. It seemed fitting that the second season of Twin Peaks began while I was out there. That show was so Pacific Northwest, with small-town values and dark, evil secrets. That was exactly the Martin apartments.’

  ‘Because rent was cheap and there was a lot of support for the arty, bohemian lifestyle, and to some extent people could live a very adolescent life for a long time very easily there, there was a certain Peter Pan element to Olympia,’ admits Slim Moon. ‘To people from other parts of the country, people in Olympia might have seemed a little naïve. But they were Peter Pans who were pushing each other to do shit. People pushed each other to excel, to make art, to be in bands, to put on shows, whatever, to do their own thing and not just be consumers. It could be elitist, and maybe there was a secret set of rules that outsiders couldn’t understand, and yes, it could be a mind-fuck. But even if Dave thought that these people are all just unrealistic snot-noses, I think that that little push that the whole subculture of that town gave musicians probably rubbed off on him in some way. Kurt came to love bands like The Raincoats and The Vaselines and even Leadbelly because of Olympia – before he came to town he was listening mainly to hard, heavy music like Scratch Acid and Flipper – so Dave would never have played on songs like [Vaselines’] “Molly Lips” were it not for Olympia. And maybe those influences bled into his songwriting when he started to do his own music.’

  Grohl did work on his own music while under Cobain’s roof, sketching out song ideas with an acoustic guitar on the singer’s four-track tape recorder. But the priority, obviously, was Nirvana. The band had rented out a rehearsal space in Tacoma, essentially a carpeted barn with a PA, and Cobain insisted they practise every day. Grohl soon settled into his new routine, and in Tacoma new songs began to take shape.

  ‘My day would start about three or four in the afternoon,’ says Grohl. ‘It was winter in the Northwest, and we’d wake up when the sun was going down. We would go to the AM/PM and buy corn dogs and cigarettes. Then we would go up to Tacoma and rehearse in the barn until about midnight, then drive back down to Olympia.

  ‘We’d always start rehearsals with a jam, an open, free-form jam, and a lot of the songs came from that. At the time we were really experimenting with dynamic, with the quiet verse/loud chorus thing. A lot of it was derivative of Pixies and Sonic Youth. You just knew when the chorus was supposed to get bigger, and you just knew the point of the song where just when you think you can’t take it any higher you do take it one step higher. From that came songs like “Drain You” and “Smells Like Teen Spirit”. I didn’t really think that much of “Teen Spirit” at first. I thought it was just another one of the jams that we were doing; we had so many jams like that, that we’d record onto a boombox tape and then lose the cassette and lose the song forever. But “Teen Spirit” was one we kept coming back to because the simple guitar lines were so memorable. That song definitely established that quiet/loud dynamic that we fell back on a lot of the time. And it became that one song that personifies the band.’

  Grunge’s national anthem actually started out as a cute little joke at Kurt Cobain’s expense. Its title came from a phrase Bikini Kill vocalist Kathleen Hanna (whom Grohl briefly dated before Jennifer Finch) had graffitied on Cobain’s bedroom wall: ‘Kurt Smells Like Teen Spirit’. Cobain thought the phrase carried a certain poetry, alluding to the rebellious attitude he’d carried over from adolescence, but Hanna was in fact teasingly observing that Nirvana’s front man was so smitten with her bandmate Tobi Vail that he was now marked with the scent of Vail’s favourite deodorant. The song itself was written in anger in the weeks after Vail dumped Cobain in November 1990. Though laced with ennui, dissatisfaction, resignation and awkwardness, at its core lies a confused young man’s heartbreak over a girl who’s ‘over-bored and self-assured’. An early version of the song contained the lyric ‘Who will be the King and Queen of the outcasted teens?’ Cobain had rather hoped it would be him and his hip, sassy and rather brilliant girlfriend. Just prior to the couple breaking up he had asked Grohl to help him ink a DIY K Records logo on his arm to impress Vail; now, in freshly penned new songs such as ‘Lounge Act’ and ‘Drain You’, he lamented the power his ex held over him. These scars would not heal so quickly.

  As Christmas 1990 approached, Dave Grohl left his lovesick friend to return home to see his family in Virginia. In truth, he was glad to escape Olympia for a week or two: he’d taken on the role of househusband at Pear Street, tidying up after Cobain, and even washing his clothes, so the idea of enjoying some home comforts back at Kathleen Place held a certain appeal. While back home, he also stopped over in Arlington to see his old friend Ian MacKaye.

  ‘We were hanging out at Dischord House and Dave said, “Oh, I have a tape of the stuff we’re recording,” and I said, “I’d like to hear it,”’ MacKaye recalls. ‘So he played “Teen Spirit”, just a rough mix of it. I said, “Wow, that is a fucking good song. This is going to be really popular.” In 1990 my band Fugazi had put out Repeater which sold maybe 200,000 or 250,000 copies and Nirvana had sold about 40,000 – 50,000 copies of Bleach, so when I said this would be popular I was thinking it could sell like maybe, 80 – 100,000 copies. I remember saying to him like, “Wow, that’s going to be a hit,” but I didn’t mean it like a hit in the Top Ten, just a hit within our filthy mass of punks.’

&nbs
p; J. Robbins, who’d sat in with Scream for a US tour during one of Skeeter Thompson’s AWOL periods, was also in Dischord House when Grohl dropped by.

  ‘I remember hearing “Teen Spirit” from the other room and being like, “Woah, that is good!”’ he recalls. ‘Dave was really proud of it, and he was all excited. Everyone at Dischord that day was like, “Wow, Dave’s new band is awesome.”’

  As Nirvana’s new songs began to take shape, so too did the background team entrusted with the task of taking the band to the next level. In November 1990 the band signed a management deal with Gold Mountain, a high-powered Los Angeles firm founded by ex-Led Zeppelin publicist Danny Goldberg and the savvy, streetwise John Silva who then, as now, looked after Sonic Youth’s business affairs. In his first meeting with the band, respectful of their relationship with Sub Pop’s Poneman and Pavitt, Goldberg wondered aloud if the trio might be interested in remaining with the Seattle label. ‘Absolutely not,’ Cobain responded instantly. The die was cast.

  Cobain had reason to be bullish. Butch Vig’s Smart Studio demo had created a buzz among the major label A&R community, and MCA, Capitol, Charisma, Columbia and Geffen records had all expressed an interest in signing the band. Even before negotiations began, both Nirvana and their management had a preference for Geffen, then enjoying a golden period commercially thanks to the phenomenal success of rejuvenated rock legends Aerosmith, their hungry, increasingly out-of-control young protégés Guns N’ Roses, leathery English cock rockers Whitesnake and Cher. Of more immediate relevance to Nirvana was the fact that Geffen A&R man Gary Gersh had recently signed Sonic Youth … and Sonic Youth had Kurt Cobain’s ear.

  ‘You can’t talk about Nirvana being on Geffen without talking about Sonic Youth,’ says Mark Kates, then the promotions director at Geffen, and now manager of MGMT, The Cribs and Dave Grohl favourites Mission of Burma at Fenway Recordings. ‘When we signed Sonic Youth Kim Gordon very specifically said to me, “The next thing you should sign is Nirvana.” I bought Bleach and I listened to it, and it sounded really dense; I’m not sure I even heard “About a Girl” right away. But the first time I saw them at the Kennel Club in San Francisco with Tad in February 1990 I remember thinking that what they were doing wasn’t as dense as that record sounded.

  ‘But the show that really impressed me on a number of levels was when they played at the Motor Sports Garage. A bunch of us were in Seattle for the release of The Posies’ Dear 23 album, and to see a local band play to over 1,000 people was significant. There were plenty of people there from record companies, and our conversations [with the band] started not long after that – not necessarily because of that show, but that show certainly made the case for them being a somewhat commercial proposition.’

  On 30 April 1991 Nirvana formally signed with Geffen. They received an advance of $287,000. As part of the deal, a further $75,000 was given to Sub Pop as a buy-out fee. In addition the Seattle label negotiated a deal whereby they’d receive a percentage of, and their logo on, the first two DGC releases, a canny move which ultimately secured their financial survival.

  Whatever he may have claimed in later years, Kurt Cobain now had his heart set on making a big mainstream rock record. At home in Olympia, he drew up a list of possible producers for Sheep – among them Guns N’ Roses producer/engineer Bill Price, Black Crowes producer George Drakoulis, Jane’s Addiction producer Dave Jerden and Steve Thompson and Michael Barbiero, who’d worked on Metallica’s … And Justice for All album. This was music to Geffen’s ears.

  At the time, every major label in America was looking for a band who could span the gap between indie/alternative rock and hard rock/ heavy metal. Elektra had The Big F, a dense, challenging noise-rock trio from Los Angeles. Epic had New Jersey’s Mindfunk, a groove-rock quintet fronted by ex-Uniform Choice frontman Pat Dubar and featuring ex-Celtic Frost drummer Reed St Mark and one Jason Everman on guitar. Atlantic had Kings X, a progressive rock-tinged power trio from Springfield, Missouri. MCA had the brilliant Dave Grohl-approved prog-thrash collective Voivod from Quebec. And Geffen themselves had LA dirtbags The Nymphs, fronted by provocative livewire Inger Lorre.

  The traditional narrative outlined when discussing Nirvana’s success in the early ’90s is that Kurt Cobain’s band represented a raw, visceral, more real alternative to heavy metal, specifically to the Aerosmith/ Zeppelin/Kiss-inspired LA ‘hair metal’ bands – among them Mötley Crüe, Poison, Ratt and Guns N’ Roses – who dominated MTV and rock radio playlists in the wake of the breakthrough success of Guns N’ Roses’ incendiary 1987 début Appetite for Destruction. This, certainly, is part of the story, but it’s not the whole story. For those prepared to look beyond the preening poseurs of Sunset Strip, metal in America was evolving, as was its fanbase. A new breed of bands had emerged with alternative/metal sounds than owed as much to Killing Joke and Joy Division as traditional metal touchstones. Awareness of these bands was not simply confined to underground metal circles either; the American music industry served notice of the new climate by including Soundgarden’s Ultramega OK and Faith No More’s platinum-selling album The Real Thing alongside Metallica’s single ‘One’ (from … And Justice for All) in the nominations for the Metal category of the 1990 Grammy Awards.

  It was Metallica who altered the playing field. Formed in Los Angeles in 1981 by vocalist/guitarist James Hetfield and drummer Lars Ulrich, and influenced by Motörhead, the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, the Misfits and nihilistic West Coast punk, the quartet began life as front-runners of the violent, chaotic Thrash Metal scene. Developing along parallel lines to the US hardcore scene, Thrash was a movement in which angry, alienated kids sang aggressive, anti-social songs to, for and about other angry, alienated kids, an underground community powered by fanzines, the trading of badly dubbed cassette tapes and a word-of-mouth, peer-to-peer buzz which was gradually amplified from a whisper to a scream. And it was Metallica who took this ferocious, flesh-stripping sound from suburban garages into the mainstream … on their own terms. If, as Kurt Cobain defined it, punk meant ‘musical freedom … saying, doing and playing what you want’, then by anyone’s standards, in the first decade of their career, Hetfield and Ulrich’s band were as ‘punk’ as any band on the underground circuit.

  The quartet’s début album Kill ’Em All, released in July 1983, had a relentlessly brutal kinetic force, which thrilled suburban teenage metal-heads looking for sounds darker and uglier than the pristine pyrotechnics served up by Iron Maiden and Judas Priest. Aged 14, Dave Grohl bought the album on mail order via an advert in metal fanzine Under the Rainbow, and it soon became a soundtrack to his misadventures with Jimmy Swanson: ‘I still listen to Kill ’Em All once a week,’ he confessed 25 years later. In March 1986, Metallica’s third album, the peerless Master of Puppets, gatecrashed the Billboard Top 30 and began a steady climb to one million worldwide sales without a single, a video or any significant above-the-radar media support at all. So anticipated was the band’s self-titled 1991 album – known to fans as ‘The Black Album’ on account of its none-more-black artwork – that on 3 August 1991 their record label Vertigo hired Manhattan’s legendary Madison Square Garden sports and entertainment complex to preview its twelve tracks over the venue’s massive PA system to anyone who cared to listen. As the opening notes of the album’s crunching opening track ‘Enter Sandman’ spilled across the arena, some 14,000 Metallica fans were in their seats to hear it; among them sat confirmed fans Kurt Cobain and Chris Novoselic. Within the record industry, heavy metal fans might have been regarded as uncouth, unclean and unsophisticated, but their passion, loyalty and intense devotion to their music were undeniable … as was their financial muscle. There was a growing awareness within the industry that this was a demographic ripe for exploitation.

  In 1990 no new band looked better placed to straddle the alternative rock/heavy metal divide than Geffen’s politicised art-rockers Warrior Soul. Fronted by Detroit-born motormouth Kory Clarke and mentored by Metallica’s hugely powerful
management company Q Prime, the band’s début album Last Decade, Dead Century, screamed on behalf of the disillusioned and disenfranchised. In April 1990, within one month of that album hitting the streets, Clarke was on the cover of Kerrang! magazine – then, as now, the world’s biggest and most influential rock/ metal magazine – with his band being hailed as ‘the hottest new band you’ll hear all year!’ Ultimately, record company mismanagement and Clarke’s stubborn refusal to play industry games conspired against them, but lessons were learned in the process: by the time Nirvana inked their contract with the label, new strategies were in place and sussed, indie-savvy personnel such as Kates, ex-SST salesman Ray Farrell and former music journalist-turned-marketing manager Robert Smith had been added to the staff. There was a feeling in the company that if Nirvana could connect with what Kates calls the ‘straightahead hard rock people’ via traditional channels such as LA’s influential KNAC radio and MTV’s Headbangers’ Ball then the band had a decent shot at matching or even surpassing the 200,000 sales racked up by Sonic Youth’s major-label début Goo.

  If the suits at Geffen required a template for such a campaign, they only had to look at the success achieved by another Seattle rock band, Alice in Chains, on Columbia records. Often written out of the history of Seattle rock – largely, one suspects, because neither Sub Pop, the hip English music weeklies nor staffers at The Rocket could take any credit whatsoever for their breakthrough – the brooding, narcotically damaged quartet had shifted a cool 500,000 copies of their début album Facelift by the end of 1990 thanks to one killer hit single (the hypnotic ‘Man in the Box’) and a relentless touring campaign which saw them support acts as varied as Iggy Pop, Poison, Slayer and Van Halen. While much more overtly metal, and infinitely less ‘credible’, than Nirvana, Alice in Chains, like Soundgarden before them, established that there was a genuine market for ‘alternative’ rock, and helped kick down doors for the ‘Seattle Sound’ at college radio, rock radio and MTV alike. Anyone who says differently simply wasn’t paying attention.